THE DREAD OF BODY-BAGS
On the 60th anniversary of Hitler's Blitzkrieg,
Alistair Home says the Anglo-Americans have
no right to sneer at the Maginot Line
SIXTY years ago this week the 'Phoney War' ended, when the Wehrmacht, 72 divi- sions strong, smashed into Holland, Bel- gium, Luxembourg — and France. Gentlemen a-bed in England comforted themselves by saying 'Thank God for the French army!' while Frenchmen crossed themselves and said 'Thank God for the Maginot Line!' Yet within ten days of the Blitzkrieg, launched on 10 May 1940, Ger- man Panzers had sliced through to the Channel. Within another month, Paris had fallen; the sacre Maginot Line, the 'Great Wall of France', bypassed and ignored, had been captured from the rear with barely a German casualty.
Ever since then, the name Maginot has been associated with failure and even betrayal, at least in the British mind. The line itself still stands defiantly, and a little ridiculously, in Alsace-Lorraine. It attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year. The French come to mourn, and perhaps to wonder; the English to sympathise and no doubt in some cases to sneer. It is hard to know what the Germans make of it, but they would scarcely be human if they did not occasionally take some pride in their fathers' and grandfathers' swift victory in the face of what seemed at the time to be so formidable an obstacle.
Andre Maginot, French minister of defence (1922-24 and 1929-32), built his defensive line well and he built it to last. One of the key spots on the line, Fort de Fermont, lies a few miles from where the Germans went through at Sedan in 1940, and it has been restored at great expense (paid for in part by the EU tourist authori- ties). On the way there one passes the emplacement of a German long-range 380-mm gun that was employed to shell. Verdun, 20 kilometres distant, in 1916. Outside, on top of the totally concealed tur- rets, cows graze amid sweet-smelling May blossom. We are led down kilometre-long tunnels, dank and fetid, to the bunk-rooms, the hospitals, the latrines (awful) and the wine-cellars (superb).
It is not difficult to imagine how ghastly it would have been during the 'Phoney War', with hundreds of frightened, evil- smelling poilus packed in together for months at a time — worse than a nuclear submarine. But there were diversions. When writing To Lose a Battle: France 1940 in the Sixties, I remember finding a marvellous photograph of naked soldiers receiving sun-ray treatment, while a sergeant sat there — apparently reading to them from Asterix.
We are whisked into the bowels of the hillside on an extraordinary little train, identical to those used in 1940, and travel more than a mile underground to reach the base of the turrets that splay out like five fingers of a hand. At the lowest point, we take a lift six storeys up, 150 feet, to find ourselves inside the turret where the cows had been grazing. It looks out towards the Rhine and Germany — but could not swing to its rear. Unfortunately, those inconvenient Germans came from behind — from the West — in 1940.
It is a relief to escape from that oppressive interior. Most of the staff are vol- unteers committed to keeping the Maginot Line alive. And indeed it should be pre- served, not least as a monument to loony defence-spending priorities, in comparison with which the British purchase of Trident warheads and Apache helicopters seems the merest trifle. M. Maginot's motives were sound enough, however. He was a war hero who had lost his leg as a sergeant at Ver- dun in 1916. In common with most French- men he was determined to avoid a repeat of that terrible blood-letting, when France suffered more than 400,000 casualties.
In 1930, 3,000 million francs — an immense sum of money for those days — were voted for the construction of the 'Oh no! It's the Love Bug.' Maginot Line. Like most grandiose defence projects, however, it was to cost many times that: by 1935, it had more than doubled its budget. Worse, there was the cost of main- taining it and manning it; in 1940 no fewer than 40 divisions — or nearly half the French army — were pinned down unprof- itably inside the line, or else protecting it from behind. Even worse, it had still not been completed by 1940, reaching only from Sedan on the river Meuse to the Swiss border, leaving open the crucial stretch from Sedan to the sea which protected the flat plain of northern France. And Sedan was where those tiresomely clued-up Ger- mans elected to go through.
Still, the Maginot Line was undeniably an impressive feat of engineering. It con- sisted of an elaborate system of forts, superb technical innovations ahead of their era. The major forts comprised between 15 and 18 concrete 'blocks' carved deep into the hillside, housing up to 1,200 officers and men, and each bristling with guns ranging in size from 37mm to 155mm. They were bomb- and shell-proof, and were sealed off against a poison-gas attack, with food, fuel and ammo to keep them going for three months.
It was truly a 'Great Wall of France', but — at the moment of crisis — was to prove a great deal worse than useless. It con- sumed the bulk of army budgets in the years before surrender. For 1936 alone, the year Hitler made his first aggressive moves, the overall allocation of the French army amounted to only one-fifth of what had already been spent on the line. So, by 1940, France could not afford the mobile armoured forces with which Hitler had smashed Poland the previous year. The counterproductive expenditure on M. Mag- inot's line could have been much more effectively spent on tanks. As it was, France had more tanks than the Germans, and some that were better. But they were deployed like a lot of small corks, to plug holes in the line; and they were useless.
We may deride Andre Maginot and the Great Wall and its consequences for France in 1940, but there is no cause for the British or the Americans to feel superi- or. The line was not an anachronistic French concept, but a hi-tech response to the dread of casualties that followed the first world war. It was far more understand- able, and indeed noble, than the dread of body-bags that seized President Clinton in 1999. The line was, in fact, the father of casualty-free strategic bombing from above 15,000 feet, and of the cruise missile.
One may well fear a future where some resolute foe of the West finds a way of going round America's Maginot Line. And, sooner or later, they will. Even Slobodan Milosevic managed to throw out a few pointers last year in Kosovo.
Telling Lives, a collection of biographical essays edited by Alistair Home, is published on 22 May.
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